Roll forming at a production facility is normally done at room temperature using a series of progressively different rollers to bend and plastically deform a sheet material into a desired form. The process is continuous and at high speed and the result is a sheet material bent into a particular profile for a particular purpose.
Future products are, however, being designed with higher strength materials, while sophisticated computer analysis is driving profile designs with increasingly greater complexity often demanding sharp corners that are also high-strength. These two factors work counter to each other and regions subjected to the large strains fracture when bending high-strength materials.
The present technology is directed primarily to a system and method that enables high speed plastic deformation of high-strength materials that are generally associated with low ductility, for example less than 10% total elongation as measured in a standard tensile test, without negative impact on the property of the resulting product.